Learning to use a new laptop taught me a valuable life lesson | Opinion

Isn’t it strange how getting used to using a new device can be so intimidating? After all, this thing it is manmade and I should be able to figure it out, right?

Several months ago, some members of my family thought it was time for me to have my own laptop. My brother Adam and my nephew Kevin were given shopping orders. A few weeks ago, they came down from Clermont in Central Florida to bring me a brand-new laptop.

I was so excited. Learning how to use it would be a cinch — or so I thought.

On their first trip to deliver my new device, Adam and Kevin came down on the Brightline train. They arrived around noon and had only about three hours before catching the 4 p.m. train back to Orlando. It didn’t take them too long to realize that we needed more time. They came back two weeks later. This time, they drove down to have more time for my laptop lesson.

I am glad I was sweet to my nephew when he was little. He and his parents came home from England in 1970, when he was barely a year old. His dad, my brother, was in the Air Force and was stationed there when he met Valerie, his wife of now, 58 years.

Kevin was my first nephew, and we bonded right away. Did I tell you he is brilliant, and seems to have the patience of Job with me?

Anyway, it never seems to bother Kevin that I am not only old. I am old school. I mean, really, really, old school.

I have a cell phone, but it is not very smart. I get Facebook posts on my phone but never have I ever posted a picture of myself, or anyone else, for that matter. If you see a picture of me on Facebook, it can only mean somebody else posted it.

In fact, when I got my first cell phone, I only wanted to know how to make calls, receive calls and get messages. It was my great-grandson Jaylen, who was only 7 at the time, who taught me how to text.

So, when Adam and Kevin brought this new device, the laptop, they assured me that it would only take a little bit of common sense to get the hang of it. Still, somehow, I have managed to let this 13-inch laptop scare me so bad that I let it sit idle for three weeks before I decided that I am much bigger and if it’s a fight it wants, well, a fight is what it will get.

It was almost like having to face the giant Goliath with a slingshot and two smooth stones. Then, I thought: If this laptop is a Goliath, then I must become David and slay this “giant” if I am to survive.

And so, I did. I slew Goliath by reminding myself that what I feared most was simply the fear of not knowing, of going into new territory with a lack of faith – in myself and forgetting that with the Lord all things are possible. Most of all, I learned that one is never too old to learn something new, or to try new things. Or laptops.

To many of you reading this, I must seem like the dumbest thing walking, being scared of a 13-inch laptop. It’s not that I’m so dumb. It’s just that learning new skills often scares me. I guess you could call it a fear of failing. Still, all my life I have been challenged to try new things, to forge new rivers, to walk a new path.

I have met the challenges, often walking into a new situation so scary my knees knocked. But I walked on. And with each step I took, I found the courage to take another. As a line in an old hymn says, “… each victory will help you/some other to win.”

Learning to use my new laptop was a victory, and reminds me of the many challenges I have faced throughout my life.

There was the challenge of learning to love myself enough to leave an abusive marriage.

The challenge of being a Black single mother bringing up two boys in a society that seemed to want to make going to prison a rite of passage for them.

And the challenge of becoming the first Black female reporter in a nearly all-male, all-white newsroom and surviving over 50 years of racism as a journalist — just to mention a few of my life’s challenges.

So, like in life, the more I faced the challenge of learning to use my new laptop, the more familiar I became with it. The more familiar I became with it, the easier it was to use.

Right now, I have been using my new laptop for nearly all day and my fingers seem to dance over the keyboard. I am proud to tell you that I did it! I have written this entire column on my new laptop!

I slew Goliath once again!